Jinto

Uh huh... right. The fact that human consciousness is a function of brain state (the research on this is too numerous to list), and the undeniable fact that the brain state following death becomes "decaying mush" aren't evidence to you?

And I did answer your question. It is precisely BECAUSE my post answers the question that you have such a problem with it.

yguy

And absolutely none of it proves that consciousness disappears with the death of the brain, only that the outward manifestation of it disappears from the POV of the living.

Marduk

I don�t find emotional�s beliefs irrational at all, (the afterlife business anyway) it is simply unprovable. For all anyone here knows, the life we are living now is an �afterlife� of something else.

He also said:

�In sum, I believe in a God of immutable natural law (Deism), in life after death in a spiritual body (spiritualism) and in the necessity to be moral and kind towards other people (humanism).�

This also is merely unprovable not irrational, also harmless and if you remove the life after death part and the word God, it is no different than humanism.

I have the opposite problem of emotional, I would love nothing more than to take comfort in the also unprovable notion that when you are dead it�s over, you are gone. But I�m afraid it�s not so easy, that you just keep reoccurring again and again somewhere in some point in time
Ya can�t win
Ya can�t break even
And ya can�t get out of the game.
The only difference between myself and emotional is that I believe there is no one in charge.

davidm

I agree with what Marduck said, and I also don't think Emotional's beliefs are irrational. No one knows what happens after you die. "Lights out forever" is the default materialist assumption, but it could be wrong. We have no evidence one way or the other because no one has ever come back from the dead to tell us (assuming nonbelief in the Christian myth).

You may live your life all over again from birth after you die. You may live a different version of your life, if the quantum many worlds idea is correct. You may die and subjectively wake up being born as an unimaginable life form on a planet in a distant galaxy.

There's no evidence that any of this is true but there is no way to rule any of it out, either. "Lights out forever" has always struck me as a very strange idea. I find it actually imcomprehensible. Where death is, experience is not. It's not possible by definition to experience a state of nonexperience. Who knows? Maybe this means experience must be eternal, and when you die you are subjectively reborn as something else. Like Marduck, though, I think no one's in charge.

Jinto

emotional, I'm going to be nice enough to issue a warning here: if you don't want to lose your belief in the afterlife, do NOT read this post.

yguy, let me assume that you have just conceded my statement is correct, that is consciousness == f(brain). Then logically, where brain = dirt (i.e. the body has decayed), then f(brain) == f(dirt). Since it is almost universally agreed that dirt is not conscious (i.e., f(dirt) != consciousness), then when you are dead, you cannot be conscious. Therefore, consciousness does indeed disappear with the death of a brain. This is obvious logic yguy, and your "well we don't know that for sure" is in every way like saying I don't know for sure that the data on your hard drive doesn't persist in some other realm after I reformat your hard drive. Now if you would like to defend this, just type FORMAT C: into your DOS prompt, and we'll talk.

So you think that life is one big Groundhog Day then? Or am I misreading this?

And that fact itself doesn't tell you something?

Other than the fact that you have to invent an invisible, immaterial dragon in my garage who somehow manages to catch precise images of people's minds at the point of their death in order to make it all work out. Okay, it doesn't have to be a dragon, and it doesn't have to be in my garage, but in no meaningful sense can you still be said to be you if you don't have your memories and your experiences, and even the most stubborn believers in dualism have been forced to admit that memory is a purely physical function (brain damage causes memory loss). Plus, there's also the issue of exactly how the immaterial "soul" manages to interact with the physical brain. Further, there's exactly what these souls are made of. Can they be destroyed (if yes, then real death is still possible)? Can they be created? If so, what are they made of, and how are they manufactured? If not, does the universe follow some law of conservation of souls? If yes to the previous question, then what happens when the number of bodies in the universe exceeds the number of souls (assuming it hasn't already happened, since GWB does seem soulless at times)? And of course, where the hell were you before you were born? As a general rule, things that increase the number of unexplained phenomena and unanswerable question as they are more closely investigated stand a good chance of being false.

Do you find deep sleep (as distinct from REM sleep, where you may dream) incomprehensible? Then what's so incomprehensible about death?

yguy

If you are determined to make utterly fatuous assumptions, I don't guess there's much I can do about it.

I certainly have never come within light-years of conceding that.

Jet Grind

So you don't think that consiousness is a brain-based phenomenon? If so, then you're simply ignoring the facts. I'd reccommend that you read The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker.

P.S. I'm wondering why you believe that the lack of belief in an afterlife is comforting.

SimplyAtheistic

Yguy: Of course no one can PROVE what happens after death, but the logical conclusion is that we simply vanish, since our brain decays. Oh wait, you have a better explanation based off of your sacred book? This is like saying we cannot prove that a nuclear bomb detonated on Venus would cause an explosion, since we haven't actually done it yet, so maybe it creates a happy garden upon detonation? Its absurd.
Jake

yguy

I don't know that it is. I suspect it is not.

You don't know the facts. You just know what someone you deem knowledgable thinks are the facts.

If you would impress me with a name from academia, try not to pick an advocate of legalized infanticide, K?

Lack of belief in an afterlife is not particularly comforting, AFAIK. Belief in the lack of an afterlife, OTOH, would be comforting to anyone who prefers not to think about what lies on the other side of the door.

davidm

Jinto,

I don't believe in a soul, and I have no belief in God. But I also think it's possible, and this is a conjecture and not even a hypothesis much less a theory, that eternal nonexperience is an incoherent concept. Deep sleep as is not eternal. And in deep sleep, absent REM sleep, I find the time between falling asleep and waking to be subjectively infinitesimal. Non-experience can't be experienced, by definition.

Where the hell was I before I was born? Well, that was "lights out." But notice it wasn't eternal. Then I was born, and acquired consciousness. I'm saying I can imagine a situation in which when I die, some sort of subjective experience begins again. The consciousness having this expereince is not the dead "me." It is just some other entity having these experiences. Is this coherent? I concede it may not be. If it makes no sense, probably the argument fails. But maybe it can be maintained. I want to think about it a little more.

I also think there could be reason to believe that when you die, you subjectively re-experience your own birth and live out your life all over again. Your life is your afterlife, eternally recurring. This could be implied by the block spacetime model of the universe, in which all "nows" exist on equal footing. Time does not pass, but we subjectively experience each moment of our life in a linear way. Then we die, and have all these subjective experiences repeat. Again, pure concjecture. I'm not proposing to argue in favor of an afterlife, but taking more of a devil's advocate stance. Mainly I'm agreeing with Marduk that Emotional's stance is nonprovable but not necessarily irrational or utterly indefensible.